The Aesthetics of Boredom in Nida

Published on Monday, 15 April 2013 16:02

16 to 25 of July 2012

Curator: Agnė Narušytė

Participating photographers: Remigijus Treigys/ Gintautas Trimakas/ Alvydas Lukys/ Remigijus Pačėsa/ Gintaras Zinkevičius

We are bored with boredom in the city that has enchained our minds with endless chores. It’s time to go to Nida. Boredom is different here: you just let the wind blow your thoughts and stay still, not worried that you keep falling behind. Only then you can start something completely new, create from almost nothing in the time stretched endless without any punctuation. It seems, Thomas Mann used to come here looking for something similar, a state of mind necessary for writing: “the impression is exhilarating and almost languorous, not so much when you are above and see both seas as in the closed hollows.” Photographers who come to Nida almost every year are also strangers, having escaped the oppressive boredom of the city to this boredom that hovers above the everydayness. Perhaps, it is this boredom that has affected their photographs. And the exhibition is different here from that in Vilnius in 2010 when the development of the ‘aesthetics of boredom’ from 1980 until today was presented at the National Gallery of Art. In Nida, everything happens as if on its own: five photographers have simply brought several of their newest works surrendering to the longing of this place because, as the German philosopher Walter Benjamin has put it, “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”

“In Zen they say: if something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.”